Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

After spending some quality time in the query trenches I wanted to address a (seemingly common) misconception about how an agent’s stated areas of interest should be interpreted. On the Waxman site, my bio says: She is actively seeking upmarket and commercial fiction, including women’s fiction, mystery, urban fantasy, romance, and YA, and voice-driven nonfiction […]

Check out this Wall Street Journal article on the trend to the dark in YA. If you’ve even strolled through a B&N or Borders you can see this move to the darker/edgier play out in the cover designs especially. I’d point out particularly the last line referencing YA novels “which initially seem frolicky and fun […]

Someone asked on Twitter, why so negative with the last post? How about the reasons you say yes? Well, they’re even more subjective than the nos, honestly, and not so interesting. But here you go, why I say yes: I love it, I can sell it, it plays to my strengths as an agent. (Told […]

We’ve updated our submissions guidelines in an effort to ensure we catch every last terrific project that comes our way. We appreciate the effort you all put into your submissions and want to handle them with the maximum respect and attention. With that in mind, we’ve revised our guidelines to make it much more straightforward […]

For this edition, I’m tackling some toughies, along with some from the last round’s comments. Let’s get to it. Again, feel free to offer up your questions, too. Q: I’m less than a month away from starting to pitch novel # 2 … which has good prospects, I think. Novel #1 was tantalizingly close. One […]

I put out a call for any questions from writers via Twitter and got some terrific ones with great applications for a wide variety of readers. If you’ve got one (of the general variety, I can’t help as much with very specific questions unique to your book), feel free to leave it in the comments–or […]

At conferences and editor lunches, the question I’m getting most is “how is the economic climate changing how you do business.” The short answer is that it’s not a matter of changing, it’s about refining. And for me, that refining is mostly taking the form of, more than ever, looking for the Big Book–fiction or […]